


without you, i am nothing; but there is always a you without me

by aastrae



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Crying, Emotional Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, I am so sorry, Implied Relationships, Kissing, M/M, Sad Ending, not beta read bc i wrote this in two hours, written immediately after watching episode 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:54:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29599974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aastrae/pseuds/aastrae
Summary: They weren’t regular cries like ones from previous nights, oh no. These were wet, chest-aching sobs that left his lungs chasing for air after each gasping breath. The adrenaline that pulsed through him was very different than the type that coursed through him under the concrete bridge.or: the before, during and after of kyan reki's fight with the one he loves most
Relationships: Hasegawa Langa/Kyan Reki
Comments: 12
Kudos: 135





	without you, i am nothing; but there is always a you without me

**Author's Note:**

> hey everyone!
> 
> ahahahaha well..... this is my first fic after uh, let's say more than a few months.
> 
> i was struggling a lot with my mental health, but i'm doing a touch better now, considering i am now able to write again :D
> 
> i started watching SK8: The Infinity two days ago, and i absolutely adore it. the animation is top tier, the opening slaps, and the characters are so well written, so it was a treat to binge-watch. 
> 
> HOWEVER :DDD
> 
> episode-7 fucked me up big time, so here i am with my first SK8 work, and it's angst :)) sorry in advance <3

\---------------

_more. more, more, more, more, MORE._

_again. i can do it again._

“Ugh!”

The sky had opened up now, unleashing a wave of fresh raindrops, slamming onto Reki’s face and rolling down the bruises smattering his cheeks. 

Tears soon chased the rain, bitter brine mixing with the fresh spring of the droplets. 

He slammed a curled fist against the road below him, sending a sharp, stabbing pain through the bruise on the back of his hand. His other arm was slung across his face, trying and failing to keep the rainfall from his eyes. 

Nightlife sounds chirped and groaned and crashed in his ears, and combined with the violent smack of the rain against the pavement behind him, Reki couldn’t take it anymore. 

_he still hadn’t done it. he still hadn’t gotten high enough._

He hissed in pain when he sat up, the ache in his thighs and back was becoming very prominent now, he hadn’t noticed it earlier when he was high on the rush of frustrated adrenaline. 

His knee knocked against the board, sending another rush of pain up his left leg. 

The stupid fucking board. 

So he kicked it. He kicked it against the massive wall of concrete before him, with the star he couldn’t touch. 

Oh, Reki _really_ wanted to cry now. But he ignored his poor, aching body and got up with great struggle, slinging his now soaked backpack over his shoulders. 

He took in a deep, stuttered breath that made his chest tremble. With pain, sorrow, or frustration, he couldn’t really tell. Maybe it was all three. 

The rain smelled awful down under the bridge. The rotting cardboard boxes combined with the muddy, dead grass made for a fine landing pad, but mixed with the wet humidity of the rain became unbearable.

He trudged his way out from under the bridge, preparing himself for his trek home. On foot. Obviously. 

The cars rushed past him in a colorful, very wet blur when he emerged from the tunnel. Splashing varied amounts of water on him as he walked along the sidewalk. At least the water was cold, slowly cooling the tender, throbbing bruises coloring his skin. 

He never once looked up, never once looked back.

\-------

When he spotted Langa waiting at the entryway to his house, Reki’s heart dropped into the concrete below him.

_why is he here? what could he possibly want?_

But when Langa called out his name, voice croaking with concern and worry, Reki tried so hard to push the tears back into his skull. 

“What do you want?”

Reki knew what Langa wanted, what he had come here to tell him. But he just needed to confirm. Needed to confirm that Langa was insane enough to _want_ to skate against the man that he knew Reki hated. 

So Langa did just that, of course, because in all the months that Reki had known Langa, he had never once lied to him. So why would that change tonight?

It was getting harder and harder to power through the tears biting at his eyes when Langa smiled at him. 

“You’d understand as a skater too, right? Skating with someone amazing like that gets you excited!”

_excited._

_excited?_

_EXCITED?_

Images of his beef with ADAM flashed quickly through his mind, recalling the absolute _terror_ he had felt while racing with ADAM. He nearly inhaled a cup of rainwater as he stared at Langa in utter disbelief. 

“I’m not excited, Langa! I’m scared! I don’t understand how you can treat this like it’s all fun and games?”

Raising his voice and seeing Langa’s face fall into utter sadness did not help Reki’s heart, which had sunk through the Earth by now, nor his head, which was pounding and aching in rage and probably a mild concussion. 

Reki couldn’t take it anymore. He needed to get out, get away, get far away from the Skating Genius Langa. 

“Ju… Just,” he stuttered out, starting to back away. “Just do whatever you want.”

He had turned completely around now, there was no way he could say the next few words facing Langa’s perfect, beautiful, stupid, grief-stricken face. 

“I can’t keep up anymore.”

And he stopped right in front of the entryway, feeling the splintered wood of his skateboard dig into the palms of his clenched hands. He took another shuddering, staccato breath. 

“.....You and I, we just aren’t a good match anymore.”

Reki dashed up the rest of the walkway towards his house, the painful, pent-up tears finally breaking free of their confinement.

\-------

Reki’s mother, thankfully, hadn’t questioned his extremely late arrival home, soaked to the bone, headband missing with tears streaming down his face.

She walked up to him slowly, in the dimly lit kitchen, and cradled his face between her warm, rough hands, and pressed her lips into a soft, sad smile, like she knew. Such goes a mother’s love. 

So he collapsed into his mother’s arms, quickly trying to muffle his sobs into the shoulder of her sweater, so as to not wake the rest of his family, who he desperately did not want to wake.

His mother simply led him over to a kitchen chair, and pet his hair gently, rubbing a soothing hand across his back as well. 

He cried. He cried, he cried, he cried. 

They weren’t regular cries like ones from previous nights, oh no. These were wet, chest-aching sobs that left his lungs chasing for air after each gasping breath. The adrenaline that pulsed through him was very different than the type that coursed through him under the concrete bridge. 

But his mother simply let him release it all into her shoulder, her chest, and into her neck. The only thing keeping him grounded was the low hum of the refrigerator, and the gentle, steady heartbeat in his mother’s chest. 

Once his breathing had slowed to a somewhat steady pace (the hiccups were getting pretty annoying), she tapped him gently on the shoulder, making him raise his head with a sniff. 

His mother, soft smile still present on her face, asked him gently, “Do you want to talk about it now, or in the morning sweetheart?”

Reki could feel his heart start to thump erratically in his chest at the thought of recounting events that had just happened mere minutes ago. 

Or could it have been hours? How long was he crying for?

“..ki? Reki? Can you hear me Reki?”

He blinked rapidly, trying to clear the leftover tears that were clouding his eyes and masking his mother’s face. 

“We don’t have to talk now, Reki, I can see that you’re really upset. Do you want to just take the day off of school so we can talk with a little less people around?”

He loved his mother. He loved her so much. But all he could give her in return was a simple nod of his head, and a pathetic, noisy sniff. 

“Alright then dear, please get some rest for now. I’ll let you sleep in tomorrow so you can get your thoughts together.”

She gave his hair one last, long pat before dropping a kiss onto his exposed forehead. 

“Goodnight Reki.”

He got up as quietly as possible, peeling his sopping backpack from his shoulders and holding it in front of him to try and control the drip that was not only coming from the bag, but from him as well. 

The floorboards, thankfully, didn’t creak much as he made his way towards his room, and made it through the doorway quickly, sliding the door shut without fanfare. 

As he looked out across the expanse of his room, from the posters, to the comics strewn across the floor, to the window with a sliver of moonlight peeking through, his eye caught lump of white piled at the edge of his bed, the only item of clothing on his bed, the only white thing in his room besides his school uniform. 

_langa’s hoodie_

Reki’s mind flashed more pictures through his aching head, images of him and Langa sprawled across the floor, phones in hand, giggling at something on Reki’s phone. 

Their legs tangled together loosely, side by side at Reki’s desk. 

Sitting on top of Reki’s bed, limbs tangled together, lips brushing together under the cover of darkness, and waking up, only to pretend it never happened. 

Reki could feel a fresh, even more painful batch of tears press up against the back of his eyelids, pressing so harshly into his sinuses that it itched terribly. 

He dropped his backpack to the ground and peeled off his school shirt and his own short sleeve hoodie, left shirtless and shivering as he made his way over to his bed. 

The hoodie hadn’t moved, hadn’t disappeared like Reki had hoped when he arrived before it. 

It was still white, clean, soft, and it was _Langa’s_.

Against all of his better judgement, fighting viciously with the tears threatening to spill once again, he lifted Langa’s hoodie to his face and took a shallow inhale. 

But no sooner had he lifted it to brush against his face, the tears were already beginning to make fresh tracks across his face for the third time that night. This time, however, there was no rain to wash them away, no mother to caress him back to Earth. 

He was alone now, face buried into his best friend’s hoodie. The aloe, linen, blueberry chapstick, laundry detergent, sweat, and something so distinctly _Langa_ filled Reki’s senses so overwhelmingly that he nearly stopped crying just to get another breath of the scent into his body. 

But of course, he ended up getting the sleeve of the hoodie soaked in salty tears and disgusting mucus. 

Reki was so exhausted. He was sad, angry, scared, worried, and still, utterly in love with Hasegawa Langa. 

He had no idea what he was going to do in the morning, what he was going to tell his mother, what he would tell his friends, and _if_ he would even speak to Langa. 

And now, his brain had finally caught up to the exhaustion the rest of his body was feeling. Each bruise, each scrape, each cut and scratch all ached and pulsed at once, forcing Reki to hug the hoodie close to his chest to distract himself from the radiating pain. 

His eyes too. 

The tears had almost completely dried up now, leaving sticky, itchy tears tracks in place of the evaporated water. His eyes even ached from all of the blinking, rubbing and wiping he had done to them. 

His eyelids felt like cinder blocks across his eyes, and so, tired of fighting against his body’s signal he keeled forward and collapsed on top of his bed, wet pants, wet belt, wet hair, and a clean, warm hoodie. 

He really wanted to care about how wet, how cold he was, but the comforting, yet sorrowful, scent that Langa’s hoodie gave off worked as some sort of sleeping draught, easing him into the realm of slumber. 

The rain still pitter-pattered right outside his window, but it was easing up now, going from a thundering, rageful dump of water from the heavens to a slowed, softer tune, akin to the drip of a leaky faucet…. a thousand times over. 

Reki thought back to that very morning, skating towards a bright and cheery Langa, and missing their promise handshake, startling Langa briefly before calling out to Reki, drifting farther and farther away from him. 

He squeezed his eyes closed, so tight and so pinched that it hurt, trying to manually speed up his fall into slumber so he could escape from his own thoughts. 

To no avail. 

So he sighed quietly into Langa’s hoodie, now slightly damp after his tears had cooled onto the fabric. Langa’s scent, thankfully, was not fading due to his tears as Reki had feared, but had only caused something worse. 

For their scents to mix together. 

Now, Reki’s nose was buried in a cocktail of Langa’s scent, Reki’s own hair and pillow, and the bitter salt of Reki’s tears. He shuddered out another breath, with no piercing pain at his sinuses. It seemed that his lake of pain had run dry. 

He curled gently in on himself, wincing slightly every time he put weight on any bruises at his sides, or if an open cut had scraped across the somewhat dry sheets. Eventually, Reki’s knees met the bottom of the bundle of hoodie. 

Reki would later realize that the embarrassment and shame of groping and sniffing his closest friend’s hoodie had simply not registered in his mind during these moments, but realistically, nothing else would have really helped him. 

In the last few moments of Reki’s cloudy consciousness, he thought of Langa. Langa’s smile, his excitement, the hopeful gleam in his eyes shining brightly through the rain. And he thought of how quickly it had morphed into regret as Reki raised his voice to admit his terror. 

He hadn’t really expected Langa to comfort him when he admitted how scared he was, through his wet and wobbly voice, but damn, it would have been nice if he had tried, even just a little bit. 

_now he just knows that you’re scared. scared of ADAM. scared of skating_

Squeezing the hoodie to his bare chest one last time, Reki drifted off to sleep, bleeding, bruised, and broken, all to the soundtrack of peaceful, summer rain.

**Author's Note:**

> i would apologize, but i had way too much fun writing this <3
> 
> i was initially considering writing a fix-it fic for episode-7, but i already have something sweet in the works for them, so i was just like: nah :D
> 
> i hope you enjoyed! feel free to leave comments, criticism, etc. 
> 
> come yell at me on [twitter.](https://mobile.twitter.com/aastrae)  
> <3


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